Almea as an allegory

Posted by Panu Petteri Höglund
on 5:31 8/8/01

In reply to: (none)

Dear Mark, after reading your "millenium rant" and other political
writings, I feel interested in Almea as an allegory of your political,
ethical and philosophical views in general. It is always risky to ask
the author himself to interprete his own work; but I must confess I
learnt very much about myself by writing my own abortive attempt to
write a conlang-inspired fantasy novel. (The conlang and the conciv, or
concult, conceived for the novel still exist; I consider making the
language - Radaz - accessible on my webpages, as soon as I get fluent in
it again; the extant corpus is very limited for the time being.) I
wonder, what for example the ktuvoki stand for. What is the part of
human experience (meaning "humankind's historical experience") you had
in mind when you designed the ktuvoki? If I may be horribly vulgar and
easy: can the ktuvoki be equated (facetiously speaking) with Hitler and
Stalin, or with big business, or with Dubya? What is the thing in
American society that "feels like a ktuvok" to you?

Mark responds:

In a sense, they're a good example of the dangers of
allegorical readings. :) The ktuvoki started out as your standard
fantasy-world evil empire. But I grew increasingly dissatisfied with
standard evil empires (omnipresent in fantasy and s.f., especially that
intended for children), and with the Manichaeanism behind them.
So I tried to reinterpret the ktuvoki in biological terms.
The result is that from a human point of view, they're evil; and
yet from a biological point of view they're not evil at all, merely
a rather unsocial species that uses slave animals as a status display.

If there's a connection to my political views, it's that I like
to understand rather than simply condemn. Not that I won't condemn. :)
But I think we have to know what's really going on in order to
effectively act. E.g., to take a Nixon or a Reagan (or, from the other
side of the aisle, a Clinton) as simply Satanic is, to my mind,
lazy and foolish. What makes them the way they are? Human beings
almost never consciously embrace evil; what assumptions or attitudes
do they have that, in their minds, justify what they do? (Once we know, it doesn't mean
that we stop resisting them; maybe it allows us to resist better.)

In Almean terms: the Almeans don't have the biological point of view
about the ktuvoki, but a theological one. That's perfectly good (indeed,
perhaps ideal) for resisting their physical and political threats.
But since it's ultimately wrong, it's no good for solving the problem
once and for all-- unless they simply killed them all off. If they
understood their biology, they might at least consider other options.

If you've read Niven & Pournelle's The Mote in God's Eye,
the issues may seem familiar. In my experience (arguing in rec.arts.sf.written), s.f. fans rush to the
theological point of view, and want to exterminate the Moties.
And Niven & Pournelle have stacked the deck with some bad biology
to make this a compelling viewpoint. But I don't like it. If genocide
is bad for human races, why is it OK for alien species?
(Of course it's possible to imagine horrors so insidious that they're
impossible to live with. But that's horror, not reality. Aliens
should fit what we know from biology about predation and virulence.)